M. Willett's profile

Trope Chere, February 12, 2006

I wanted to read this book from the minute it came out in print. Everything about it: the subject, inset drawing, even the chapter titles cried out, promising "the great Parisien adventure lay within!" Though I'm glad to have read it, I must say that I was disappointed by the experience. In the book's defense, though, it should be mentioned that Paris to the Moon isn't a novel, but a collection of essays, written principally for the New Yorker, which have been gathered, a bit haphazardly, here.
Every chapter or subsection is ended as neatly and memorably (if, sometimes, illogically) as a newspaper column. Some, like the chapter "A Tale of Two Cities," sound… Read more

Life-Sized, February 12, 2006

Okay, so the man didn't exactly need redeeming in my eyes. I thought him a kind of hero before I picked up this book and think of him that way still, though now I have better reasons for it than his public humility, esteem on the world stage, and deft financing of public schools across the country. In his biography, Clinton plies his stock-in-trade, or better, his skill in spades, charm, to his life, both private and political, early and late. When was the last time a public figure acted with such transparency regarding his motives, failures, and frustrations? If he is guilty here of recasting his life favorably, as most biographers eventually are, it is not the usual kind of… Read more

Wit, Wisdom, Prose, and Plants, February 12, 2006

After having listened with delight to the audio version, I ordered the hardback copy, knowing it was precisely the sort of narrative to which I would return. I've read it twice since then. Who can say why? Well, no, it isn't great literature exactly, though the writing is accomplished, and it takes as its subject, moreover, a gardener from England who "made it big," at least in the gardening world, and in the British one; I'd never heard of him.
Still, the style is so winning, in that gently self-effacing way of the English, and the portrait so honestly done-with the care and attention and patience it must take to design and grow a garden-that it is now the blueprint… Read more